


Lyra's Thirtieth Birthday

by psocoptera



Series: Thirty Fic [3]
Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: 30Fic, Alethiometer Use, Angels are Dicks, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-09
Updated: 2007-12-09
Packaged: 2018-02-10 17:12:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2033205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After years of studying alethiometry, Lyra is almost ready to start asking real questions.  She has a lot of questions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lyra's Thirtieth Birthday

Lyra wakes up at her desk and realizes that it's her thirtieth birthday; also that she's fallen asleep face-down in a puddle of ink again, and there's a candle stub melted into her hair.

She's pleased to note she had the presence of mind to push her notebook off to the side, though, and as she blinks herself awake she picks it up and squints dubiously at the violent slashes of her handwriting. (She's never managed to write neatly outside of a penmanship exercise, and she fills notebooks at a terrifying pace, but at least it's legible these days... to herself, anyways.) Oh, right - she'd lain awake buzzing with anticipation and had finally pulled out the second order philological paradoxes to distract herself. She shoves the notebook back into its gap on the in-progress shelf and stretches like an orangutan while Pan uncurls from a ball on her feet and undulates like a sea serpent. (Wildman-dolphin-baby, she thinks automatically.)

Sitting back down, she can hardly believe this is it, today. She blots absentmindedly at her face with the hem of her skirt until Pan reminds her that despite her other plans, she does still have to go do her lecture at St. Sophia's, and nudges her towards the bath.

In the bath she pries irritably at the candlewax. Pan points out that she could just use the anbarics, and she tells him like she always does that she likes her tiny fires. Then it occurs to her that replacing the abstract with the universal specific in the third term in future-form questions would constrain the factuality function, why hadn't she ever seen that before, and she ends up leaning over her desk, standing naked and dripping, while she scribbles it down.

So maybe she's a little distractible - she ends up just snipping the lump of wax out with a pair of scissors - but it's a big day! She knows that she shouldn't expect any big breakthrough right away but it's so good just to be here, finally going to start her real work.

She pulls a clean dress over her head and looks at herself in the mirror. "I am the youngest alethiometrist there has ever been," she says experimentally, to see how it sounds.

She is. They had told her, at thirteen, that no one had ever successfully read the alethiometer before reaching their fifth decade, that some thought that the number, two score years of life, was in itself significant somehow. Lyra had scoffed at that. If it was life experience that was the issue, hadn't she already lived more than most? And if it was the number, well, they'd just have to see about that. She figured that if everyone else came to it in University and was getting good about twenty years later, she had a good seven years head start at least, and could expect to get along faster besides, having already done it once.

And she'd been right. She had reliably read her first simple answers almost five years ago ("Where is the pen? The pen is on the table.") and had found her first missing child only a year after that, one day when the housekeeper's daughter wandered off. It had been a harrowing experience, grimly hoping that she was reading it right and not leading the frantic parents off in the wrong direction, and her relief when they found the child had been overwhelming. She had set aside the alethiometer for weeks and returned to it cautiously, doing nothing but practicing the elementary exercises. It had been only recently that she felt ready to begin a real program of directed inquiry, and she had decided to make it a birthday treat.

"Where to start" is a question that fills dozens of her notebooks. She had thought for years and years that the minute she could read it again, she would ask about Will. Or maybe her first real question would be about her parents - but Serafina Pekkala had finally told her, when she turned sixteen, what had happened to them. Further on, she had come to realize that there was no "real first question" - you used the alethiometer in little ways to help you learn to use it in bigger ways.

Some alethiometrists stopped there - their studies focused entirely on better understanding the working and meanings of the alethiometer, or the related disciplines. You could only ask a question you truly understood, and given the scholarship necessary for even the most basic reading - studies in etymology, history, the classical languages, mythology, and more - it was not surprising that, upon gaining the ability to receive answers, the mysteries and puzzles encountered along the way were the focus of the questions. Most other alethiometrists had been employed in the service of the Church and they had set the questions put to them and no others. Lyra shudders a little when she thinks of having truth at her fingertips like that and never being allowed to chase it.

"No one's ever going to put chains on us, right, Pan?" she says. Pan nuzzles her reassuringly - as if they could! She'd been in the experimental theology labs asking questions the day she figured out she was going to need to learn natural philosophy. Dame Hannah's long illness and the apparently inability of the surgeons to do anything about it had made her realize how much there was that nobody knew about the human body, leading to her sitting in on surgical lectures, and eventually even participating in anatomical dissections, despite great upset among the Scholars over the propriety of such studies for a girl barely out of her teens. She glances over at the shelf of notebooks in which she and a few of the surgical fellows have tried to map out a line of questions simple enough to be answerable but potent enough to accelerate their etiological research. Not today, she thinks, but soon...

Today is for something else. She had been nineteen, struggling over a problem of idiom translation, when it had crossed her mind that she could probably figure it out in ten minutes if she had just been able to talk it over with one of the mulefa. And all at once she was bent over, white-faced, shaking, with the sudden realization of what had really been lost. It was like the thought of Will had been a band, wrapped around her grief and holding it together, and that band had snapped and her feelings had burst out in all directions. All this time she had been missing Will, thinking of the feel of his hands and the sound of his voice, and she had forgotten the grandeur of the seedpod trees, the fierceness of the Gallivespians... bad enough to lose her love, but that she would never again talk to a Gallivespian! And not just her, nobody!

"Imagine if they built a wall right around Brytain," she had said, voice shaking with passion, trying to explain it to the other Sophia girls. "And whatever the French and the Muscovites did, we were never going to hear about it, and our artists were never going to go study those Nipponese block things and the Lascars weren't going to come here to cook and when we figured out, you know, wireless and better engines and things, we couldn't tell everyone about them so that they could use them too, and, you, Jen, just knew the Pyramids were out there somewhere but you weren't ever going to go paint them on your holiday." They had nodded, wide-eyed; they'd never seen Lyra rage like that.

She'd written furiously, far into the night. If Dust was matter coming to know itself and Dust gave rise to angels, why would one _world_ coming to know another give rise to _Specters_? Is the essential nature of everything dual, the worlds and the Abyss? If understanding each other is one of the great virtues, why constrain it to this little sphere? And if it was good to help each other here, why not the same for the worlds too? Lyra had thought of the devastation of Cittagazze, of a whole generation of children trying to reinvent their civilization. The angels really couldn't have left the windows open long enough for someone to make sure they were back on their feet? And, thinking of the angels, why did they sometimes show up in the philosophy chapels to make pronouncements against certain lines of research? The boys in Clarendon, the ones who hadn't managed to keep Lyra out of their lab, had really thought they might be onto a remote viewer before the dire warnings. And why had Xaphania been so adamant that there be no travel to other worlds? Why did so many different amazing worlds even _exist_ , if they were going to have to stay apart forever and ever? Just for the angels to see? Xaphania had said the angels could still travel, and that Lyra could too, by "imagination". Lyra had begged Dame Hannah to ask the alethiometer about that, in her early days at St. Sophia's, and Dame Hannah given in and later told her with a puzzled frown that she hadn't been able to phrase the question, that she had tried to focus it on the meaning of what had been told to Lyra, and was Lyra sure she had heard right?

Pan bites gently into Lyra's hand and she realizes that she's lost in the past again. She has a thousand questions and more and today she will finally start to ask them, many long years of work to define alethiometrical phrasing for Specters and worlds and windows about to end in... many more long years of work to understand the answers. But right now she has just enough time for her morning routine before she needs to go give her lecture.

This is nothing Dame Hannah had taught her; it's a little bit things Pan picked up on his travels, a little bit things Serafina Pekkala said, a little bit things she just worked out for herself. She notes the questions she intends to ask in the relevant notebook - they're the same questions she asks every morning, but she always, always writes down every set of positions to which she sets the hands. The answers are mostly unintelligible without the original mental context, but you never knew when you were going to want to check back on something. She sits down on the floor and does her Hindoo breathing until her mind begins to float, and then she asks the first question.

She had asked it for the first time sitting on a bench at Midsummer, and now she asks it every day: _what single action can I take today that will make me happiest?_

She watches the golden hands spin. _study learn share love_ , the alethiometer says. She will write it down when she is done, although she gets the same answer every time.

She frames the second question: _what single action can I take today for the greatest happiness of the greatest number?_

_study learn share love_ , the alethiometer tells her like always. And then it's time to go.


End file.
